Atlas Technology Management Pte. Ltd (Atlas) the Singapore headquartered technology group and one of the world’s largest companies in application specific computing has said in its year end note that it expects aggressive growth from its bitcoin mining operations in 2022 and that it sees and abundance of opportunities to expand its services in the face of a Web 3.0 future.
“Atlas is looking to roar into the Year of the Tiger on the back of a successful and transformative 2021. Despite some headwinds and the persistent uncertainty with the COVID pandemic, the investments and partnerships that were made over the past 12 months have, in our minds, uniquely positioned us to seize on opportunities in 2022 for unprecedented growth.”
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Built for growth
Atlas has full confidence in the long-term growth of the high-performance and application specific computing market. Based on this long-term view, Atlas has designed an aggressive investment strategy across facilities, hardware, and people.
To date, Atlas is operating across multiple countries and regions. Quarterbacked from Singapore, it has built a distributed computing network with operation and management teams in North America, Central Asia (Commonwealth of independent states), and northern Europe.
Atlas has planned to further accelerate its expansion to other regions and markets to be a truly global enterprise. “We are immensely proud of the impact that our operations are having on the communities that we are located. We have catalysed conversations with the public and private sectors for further investment in alternative energy production and infrastructure. And we have hired exceptional talent, and continue to offer local job opportunities in these communities.”
The backbone of Atlas’ success is the secure supply chain of hardware and understanding of its inventory life cycle to keep its fleet optimized. In 2021, Atlas purchased more than 300,000 ASIC computing servers which will allow it to continue to increase its computing share within the BTC network.
This is not the extent of Atlas’ growth, as it pursues plans to acquire more servers over the next two years, as the demand for ASICs and distribute computing services intensifies. As a major player in the server supply chain, Atlas has close relationships with server manufacturers and suppliers, and plans further investment into the supply chain.
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Sustainable future
Over the course of 2021 much was spoken about the impact that bitcoin and bitcoin mining are having on the environment. Whilst some of these myths have largely been debunked, there remains bad actors that try to take advantage of opportunities. Atlas believes it has a responsibility to lead the industry towards a more sustainable and positive future, and to be a ESG compliant company.
Atlas has been steadily increasing the usage of green energy among to power our global computing network and continue to explore alternatives and new technologies to increase the ratio of green energy in our overall energy consumption mix.
Its acceptance into the Blockchain Mining Council in late 2021, was a strong endorsement from our peers of the influence that we hold. With Texas as its home for US-based operations, the company has established a fruitful relationship with the Texas Blockchain Association and as a member of the Blockchain Association of Singapore Atlas is committed to working together with its peers around the world to improve the industry.
In 2022, Atlas plans to collaborate with a leading consulting firm and research institution, to build up a systematic and adaptive carbon footprint monitoring standard. A standard the company intends to share with the high-performance computing industry. Atlas upholds the belief in “tech for good” and will be making further ESG investments.
Atlas is planning to collaborate with leading research institution on cutting-edge cooling technology (i.e. immersion cooling), and server placement mechanisms. “We believe the outcomes of this collaboration can materially reduce the cost of related new cooling technology, and improve the technology’s availability and feasibility. We have also initiated high-level discussions and remain open to engage prospective partners to explore advanced server placement mechanisms (i.e. sub-marine data centers). It is our ambition to setup the first sub-marine data center within two years.”
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Insights of Bitcoin Mining
1. In essence, BTC is a distributed computing network which can support more applications beyond only “mining” and “asset transfer” purposes
BTC is often considered to be a highly liquid asset or a “currency”, but essentially it is a distributed computing network. As technology evolves, the underlying network of bitcoin can provide more than just computing services of “asset transfer”. Its gigantic scale of computing power, robustness, and decentralized nature allow it to provide secure verification services for a wider range of applications. For example, there are many start-ups, working on establishing decentralized internet browsers, data storage applications on top of the computing network.
2. BTC mining is a prototype for the future distributed computing network and it is the basis of Web 3.0 infrastructure.
In addition to supporting a wider range of applications, BTC mining, more importantly, shall be seen as a viable prototype of future distributed computing networks. For example, future applications of the Metaverse are unlikely to be built on current cloud computing networks – which are more vulnerable to cyber-attacks and by their very centralized nature are controlled by a select group of companies. Distributed computing networks are an extension of distributed ledger technology, which enables a multi-vs-multi economic relationship. The security robustness and stability of the BTC network has been proven sound over the past few years. Atlas believes such a network is an important building block of Web 3.0 and moreover will inspire more distributed computing networks to be built.
3. The BTC network is in fact a highly energy efficient network, far exceeding the energy efficiency of traditional financial networks
BTC has often been criticised for consuming too much energy, but this assessment is often misguided. When compared with traditional finance payment networks which are still operating on legacy infrastructure. We can see that that traditional finance remains insecure and extraordinarily inefficient. For instance, to process the same number of transactions, the BTC network can retain more copies of transaction records, hold a longer transaction history, and complete the transactions in a fraction of the time, all the while consuming less energy in the process.
4. BTC Mining is an accelerator of innovation and emerging technologies, stimulating new chip design, and renewable energy technology
BTC mining, as a dedicated computing application for fixed algorithms, has all participants committed to a common goal – to seek for extreme efficiency – due to its incentive mechanism and business model. The direct consequence of extreme efficiency has been to drive the development of chip technology. In fact, BTC mining has been the first large-scale adopter of advanced semi-conductor processors, whether from 16nm to 7nm, 7nm to 5nm and possibly in the future to 3nm or even more advanced processes.
In addition to this, as BTC mining’s computing is continuously running, it is not only in great demand for energy companies but is also able to use energy consistently. This means miners are valuable customers for energy companies. An interesting fact is that BTC mining, because of its flexibility, has the option to briefly turn off some of its servers during peak grid hours, thus releasing a large supply of electricity back to the grid. This enhances stability of the electricity system and increases BTC miners’ profitability.
As visionary as these outlooks may appear, they are in fact very current in their potential. Atlas is working in-house and with external partners to better understand the value add that we can provide the BTC network. 2022 will be the year that we tackle these purpose and conviction to grow the market and our market share at the same time.
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